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There seems to be a huge craze lately with everyone trying to blog and ping to get their websites indexed into the search engines. Although this can be a great tool, all marketers should first understand exactly what they’re getting themselves into before starting.

This article is to serve as a beginners guide to getting started with blogging and pinging.

1. What is a blog?

A “blog” is short for “web log.” A web log is an online diary or journal. The main aspect blog is that it is frequently updated - at least once a week, sometimes every day or even more.

Since blogs are regularly updated, they tend to carry more value than regular static HTML pages (in some cases).

2. What is a ping?

A ping is a program that sends out a brief request for a response from another computer or server. When you ping on the Internet, you send out a program to see if a remote server is responding.

3. How do bloggers use pings?

Two main reasons to use pings with blogs: First and foremost is to let the search engines know that you have updated your website so they can send their spiders.

Secondly, pings also update the websites on the internet who are using your blog on their site (through a feature called RSS feeds, they are displaying your messages on their site).

4. So what is the big deal about blogging and pinging?

Smart affiliate marketers use blogging and pinging to help get their sites crawled and indexed by the search engine spiders a lot quicker than they normally would.

They set up a blog either on their main site or on a sub-domain of their site. They then post links to their product pages on their blog and send out a ping to all the major servers on the Internet.

That ping says “This site has fresh content, time to go add it to your database!” It’s a trigger that sends the search spiders looking for updated pages on your site. When they find the new pages, search engines tend to index them much faster.

Blogging and pinging will not get you into EVERY search engine overnight. As of this writing, it is most effective with getting into Yahoo. But often MSN, and even Google, will follow in short order.

Combine blogging and pinging with good link recruiting for the best indexing.

Also, blog and ping on a regular basis if you want to “stay” indexed in the search engines.

6. Is blogging and pinging a requirement to get indexed?

No. You can get indexed quickly by getting plenty of natural backlinks. But for backlinks to be most effective, they have to appear as if they were natural and this can take weeks if not months. Blogging and pinging does seem to drastically shorten the process.

7. Is there a downside to blogging and pinging?

Yes, some marketers are starting to abuse this strategy and the engines are getting wise to it! If you go over-board you risk getting your website completely banned and removed.

Also, many marketers are blogging and pinging for a few days and then forgetting about the website - your website will likely be de-indexed if you do not continue to naturally blog and ping.

The bottom line is that blogging and pinging is a great strategy right now to help you get your website indexed faster. However, the old natural way of getting incoming links is still the best and most assured way - not to mention the long-term benefits of having incoming links.

If you have not yet started blogging and pinging, I suggest you start with a practice website first, not your main website.

Copyright 2005 Kurma Group

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The items covered here are:

1) Don’t Wait before Blogging.

2) Using Blogs to get your site found quickly.

3) What have Blogs and PR got to do with Indexing.

4) How to get your large sites pages found quickly.

5) If you’re using Adsense on those Pages - learn from this.

6) If you’re selling Clickbank products - you need this.

1) Don’t Wait before Blogging.

If you’ve been looking at creating a blog but don’t know how or why to do it, stay tuned for a new product announcement that’ll help you out.

Just to show you how quick and easy it can be, I’ve created several new blogs and fed them all through ‘feedburner’ to add tracking facilities and I’ll be conducting some tests and giving you the results when I’m done.

I now use Blogger for 30 different blogs. It’s easy to use, you can include Adsense within their interface easily, you can have it ftp the files to be hosted automatically on your own website etc. etc.

If you want tracking, whether you host the blog your self or not, you can go to Feedburner and ‘burn’ the feed. This will not only giving you tracking stats but also let you tweek it to be more compatible (Bloggers default output format is .atom) and also add other revenue streams to it.

I’ve blogged an introduction to RSS which I believe is currently the best free information around Here , and the ‘burnt’ version is: Blogging

Video tutorials for setting up a blog, configuring the blog, pinging, ‘burning feeds’ etc. are available here:
http://pheedcentral.com/blogandping_offer.html

2) Using Blogs to get your site found quickly.

If you’re struggling to get new websites found by the Yahoo Search Engine, here’s a little tip you might like.

Set up a Blog with whichever service you prefer (I like Blogger.com)Go over to Yahoo.com and setup a ‘MyYahoo’ account. It’s free.

Then on your MyYahoo homepage and goto the section that says ‘choose content’ and then tick the box that says RSS Headlines (BETA).

Add your feed url(s) to this, so that they are shown on your MyYahoo page.

Yahoo will be around with 48 hours. I’ve created videos of this that I’ll release very soon.

3) What have Blogs and PR got to do with Indexing.

The reason that Blogs and PR are linked to getting indexed is this:-

A) When you setup a blog it’s not quite the same as having a new website because there’s one major difference - Even if they don’t have the facility built in, you can effectively ‘announce’ the presence of your blog (and any new content you add to it) by ‘pinging’ (sending an announcement to) several large blog directories. In effect, this is like doing the ‘add url’ on a search engine, except that blogs get visited Very quickly whereas it could take ages for your site to get indexed this way.

If you use Blogger then there’s a tickbox labelled “ping Weblogs” which if selected, will announce your new content to the Weblogs.com service whenever you post new material - this has the effect of getting the Googlebot (not mediabot) to visit your blog sometimes within minutes. Thus, if you’ve linked to some new pages on your site (some deep pages) - they usually also get a visit pretty quickly.

It’s like getting a link from somewhere you know gets spidered regularly - except you can cause it to be spidered. (which is nice).

If you want Yahoo to come and see you quickly too, whether you’re using Blogger or a different blogprogram, you can create a free MyYahoo account and add your feeds to it - that’ll have the effect of ‘announcing’ them to Yahoo.

Again, the reason for this isn’t to make your blog rank well - it’s to get the links to your actual websites new pages to get spidered quickly because you’re using the blog to call the bots for a visit and linking from the blog to your new pages.

B) The Page Rank comments - These are a reflection of the fact that in general, higher page rank sites get visited by the bots more frequently (since you can have a high PR from good internal linking and a few high PR incoming links from sites without much traffic - this is a generalisation and NOT a rule), so it’s more likely that if you’re not blogging and pinging that a few high PR links (from traffic heavy sites) will be a good alternative.

If you want even more, here’s something I wrote on another forum recently (and in my blogs) about getting a high page count site indexed quickly:

4) How to get your large sites pages found quickly.

No-one can guarantee that your site will be indexed in 24 hours since the only person with ultimate control is Google.

However, the key to getting a new site fully indexed is deep linking.

If you were to just leave the site and get links to the index page, you could end up waiting 9 months to get it all in.

Have you created a site map(s).

Depending on your site, it may pay you to create several site maps for different parts of your site.

The basic principle is this:

The Search Engine Bots will investigate pages that they find links to from pages that they’re already visiting (you know this since you mentioned blog and ping).
When they do this, the work on a portion of the pages they’ve found about about at a time, so the more pages and the deeper the links to those pages - the longer it will take and the more times the bot will need to come back to get more.

So, the most effective thing you can do is: Create several site maps which cover lots of pages that have fairly shallow linking the get to them all (normally 2 levels max).

So rather than having 1 huge site map that lists every page. Create 5 site maps of 1000 links, or even more.

Then - Get links to these separate site maps aswell as your main index page. From as many different, high quality, high traffic sources as you can.

Blogs, RSS, Forums, Directories are all good examples of these.

If you get desparate you can buy links from high PR sites, but there’s no need.

Any of the large, popular forums probably get visited by the bots every day (my own site does).

If you’re not sure where to find directories to submit to, I’ve put together a huge list here: http://www.moneyandmotivation.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=162

If you want places to submit your blog/rss feed, I’ve put together a good list here: http://pheedcentral.com/weblinks/Submit_Your_Own_RSS_Feeds/

Jason Bradley has a product called IndexTracker that you can use to track indexed pages across all of your websites. I use it a lot.

Blog and Ping tutorial videos are available here:
http://pheedcentral.com/blogandping_offer.html

5) If you’re using Adsense on those Pages - learn from this.

Improving Adsense click through rates is something that any ppc advertiser should be interested in.

Well, I’ve spent some time now looking at all the various keyword research tools for selecting the most profitable keywords to target with Adsense.

To my delight, I also stumbled upon an ebook written by a guy called Jonathan Legar that covers it all. He also provides you with a huge list of profitable keywords (including some that are as much as $100 a click - yes you heard me right)

I just had to tell you about this amazing resource.

I know you’ll just love this resource.

http://hop.clickbank.net/?techtrader.astracker

When you see that Jonathan is also going to let you reprint over 11,000 article - this is a Must Have for any website owner or PPC advertiser.

Have fun with it.

6) If you’re selling Clickbank products - you need this.

If you sell Clickbank products, you’re probably aware of the fact that the Clickbank Marketplace is updated regularly, and as an affiliate it can be difficult to remember what products you’re advertising and whether there are any more in that same category of CB yet.

Well, now you can forget about the hassles of keeping up with the product in Clickbank, or buying tools to let you search Clickbank, and then working out how to advertise those products on your web pages. You know it sounds simple, but it can be a real pain to get setup and maintain.

If you take a look here: http://www.imvisionary.com/cmd.php?af=186978

You’ll find a new tool - It’s only just being released (not yet in the open) and you’ll see that it gives you an really easy, cheap and quick way to market ClickBank products.
It’ll synchronise with Clickbank Whenever you want and you can even search for products to promote.

I’m not going to give you a sales pitch here, just go and take a look at it.

If you’re not sure how it might work and you want more - I’ve even created a 6 minute video walkthrough of using it.
(It was 1am and I was tired, but you’re worth it)

If you followed everything I wrote above - you’re in for some happy days

Your friend,
Andy Henry

Andrew Henry is an Internet Marketing consultant and online web business owner. Helping individuals and small businesses learn how to reach their goals on a daily basis.
Andrew is now educating people on the subject of RSS and Blogging via his site at http://www.pheedcentral.com which offers both free introductory advice on RSS and Blogging and supporting video tutorials.

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